Bigot Hall (13 page)

Glad of the company of a gormless tyke to whom he could feed outrageous bullshit, poor Mr Cannon would spin me the same yarn every time he had a break from maximum security.

‘You’re descended from werewolves,’ he said, going at his leg irons with a bandsaw. ‘Why d’you think Uncle Snap’s forever howling at the moon?’

‘Because he’s a throwback and barking mad.’

He eyed me with sharp good humour. ‘Why d’you say – “barking”?’

I explained that if the lifespan of the world were a twenty-four hour clock, humans would appear at two seconds to midnight and Snapper would appear at teatime.

‘Precisely,’ said Cannon. ‘And aren’t you always saying he’s only just learnt to walk on his hind legs?’

‘It’s a metaphor, Cannon - something a strumpet like you wouldn’t understand. Don’t drill here, you moron - take it to the foundry.’

‘Think carefully, laughing boy – haven’t you an appetite? If it so much as moves you pour milk on and eat it.’

‘Out of sheer bloody desperation!’

‘No smoke without fire.’

‘You know very well there is - get out you bastard and take your ribboned premise with you.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he said, standing up with a smirk of mischief, ‘turn thirteen and you’ll know exactly what you are.’

But after three years of being dripped such effervescent nonsense I no longer bothered to reject it. Amid the unnameable abjections of the Hall it made a refreshing change from the truth and was quietly absorbed into the charcoal of my flash-fried personality. I had always known the others were keeping some grand secret from me - Mister Hieronymus had said as much. Clearly I would start roaring at some point and undergo an agonising change, my bones thickening and creaking like the plot of
Uncle Silas
. I’d howl at the murky window and so on. I was glad to have something to look forward to.

Fascinated by the idea, I lay at night believing that I sensed the onset of the transformation. Adrienne became worried that I no longer struggled against my chains. ‘It’s no fun when you’re like this, laughing boy. Won’t you pretend for me?’

‘These chains are the best idea you ever had, sis. Come my birthday, we’ll need them.’

Adrienne pouted so that her mouth, regrettably, resembled the suction pad of an octopus.

‘The werewolf,’ she later read from a monster encyclopaedia, ‘can be killed by a silver bullet through the heart.’

‘So can I.’

‘There’s more. It’s covered in hair, eats sheep, sees in black and white and is easily enraged.’

It became clear that we were dealing not with a mythical beast but a vapid adult male. I saw the slow-motion fire-bombing of my spirit. ‘Tighten the chains,’ I blurted. ‘It’s a bloke I’m turning into.’

‘That’s not terrible,’ said Adrienne scornfully.

I told her to take a gander at the precedents. Uncle Snapper - nought to sixty in five hours. Roger Lang - oblivious to anyone but himself. Father.

‘What about him?’

I slammed into Father’s study. ‘No hanging and shooting Uncle Snap this birthday, Father - I want answers. Why has poor Mr Cannon been telling me all these bloody years I’m due for the wolfhouse? I’ve been straining to endure an erupting musculoskeletal system because of his lies.’

‘He meant it kindly, lad - a distraction. Misguided ofcourse - you could park a ship in his madness. People make a meal out of a tedious transition. Truth of it is the meatheads you deplore were meatheads from the start. Snap, for instance, thundered antlered and snorting into his teens without a twang - just got louder, is all. Here’s a picture of him aged two.’ Father showed me a picture of a toddler at the handles of a Gatling gun. ‘Same goes for the ineffectual,’ he said, becoming balmy and philosophical. ‘Whatever the quality, it’s expressed to progressively exponential extremes. The power-hungry will inevitably run for leadership and the drab will support them - but you know this, laughing boy.’

‘I suppose so,’ I frowned, picking up a clock from the mantel. In five minutes I would be thirteen. ‘But what’ll happen to someone like me?’

Father’s face froze with fear, then seemed to crumple. ‘I could be wrong,’ he stammered. ‘Exceptions to everything under and over the sun ...’

I couldn’t watch his uncertainty. Returning to Adrienne’s room, I lay on the bed. ‘Tie me down,’ I said.

‘Remember a chap who played the petal-pulling game with the pin of a grenade. Got as far as “She loves me” and blew to pieces like a dandelion head. That’s the way to go, laughing boy.’

‘Yes, Father.’

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house and some of us were examining a meal. The tree had thrown branches in all directions with a vigorous irregularity. Uncle Snap said he could shoot the cloth out from under the tableware. I had to stand up to laugh.

‘The Dodger there,’ muttered Snap to Father, nodding in my direction. ‘I can’t stand him.’

This veiled utterance signalled the start of the morning argument. ‘Rattling your chains,’ rumbled Snapper, ‘untroubled by the snares of reality and expecting it all. You and your infantile aggrandisement have buried the rest of us in steaming bullshit.’

‘Beg pardon, Uncle?’ I asked, turning to him. ‘Miles away.’ A vein in his temple bulged like an inner tube. ‘Don’t look at me that way, Uncle - not without pupils.’

Snap turned to Father. ‘The boy’s beyond everything,’ he said, voice shrill with incredulity. ‘Feed him poison and he’ll grow fat on it, laughing in your face!’

‘Fine words,’ I stated after a considered silence, ‘from a man who has a vestigial tail in the shape of a Cluedo character. Tell it to a court-appointed psychiatrist, Snapper. You contain enough hot air to fire a cob across a ten acre field.’

I knew I was punching him in the head, an activity I have never been able to control - but my thoughts were elsewhere. I pondered the way a manta ray will filter plankton and small fish from water passing over its gill arches. There’s efficiency for you.

My attention returned to Snapper. ‘That’s
another
time he’s punched me!’ he complained each time I punched him.

‘More in sorrow than in anger,’ I lied. I was so angry I could barely maintain my own accent.

But I had forgotten the Duel Rule. As teenagers Father and Snap had argued. Father had set fire to the bill of his brother’s hat and shoved him through a plate glass window. To settle the rip they had a handgun duel which went wide. This tradition had been preserved like a tequila worm. At thirteen - an age I had never thought to see - I was ripe for the consequences of my belligerence.

I’d done it now.

As the day grew hotter my hopes of survival turned to mist. Leap was painting a starter mark on the lawn. ‘It’s about that time,’ said Mr Mandible, regarding his watch. ‘Thought I’d tell you before the appropriate moment’s past - your head, it looks like a spud.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Ah, don’t thank
me
,’ he said and wandered off, cheerful and vague.

Snapper climbed down from his treehouse dressed in combat gear and a ninja hood. Ignoring me, he began a preparatory breathing exercise.

‘Laughing boy,’ said Leap, startling me - I spun to face him. ‘A word in your bell-like. Your lethargy has wrought the havoc we are used to. Even the flowers have ceased functioning as a result of your leering hatred. You’ve contributed more than anyone to the hellish incineration of human understanding. I feel a raw bleeding wonder when I see you lacking expression from ear to ear. I’d split my own meat to know what you’re up to. Watch your back.’

‘Better get over there, laughing boy,’ said Father, striding up.

‘I seem not to have any choice in the matter,’ I said morosely.

‘The darkest hour’s just before the dawn.’

‘So are the majority of bed deaths, Father.’

‘You a man or a mouse?’

‘I appear to be allowed the understanding of the latter.’

‘Well your Mother, Nan, Adrienne and I, we’re all right behind you – isn’t that right -? Ah they’re talking to Snap. Well, off you go.’

‘Au revoir.’

‘Indeed - and the best of British luck to you.’

‘Then it’s goodbye.’

I started across the heat-blurred lawn toward the sentry figures of Snap and the Verger. I felt as if I was walking to the circus and clung to the hope of a sudden, distracting haemorrhage. Everything felt obscenely real as I reached the starter mark. ‘Your damnation’s on the cards, laughing boy,’ stated the Verger, opening the gun box to reveal two machine pistols. Snap took his and slapped in a magazine, braying with laughter. My mouth was too dry to tell the Verger what I thought of him, my mind too ripped to think it. I took the other gun, which was as heavy as a crowbar, and pushed in a magazine uncertainly. The Verger placed the box aside. ‘Thirty paces and no pausing to poison the well - agreed?’

Snapper nodded formally. I licked my lips and said thickly, ‘You have my sacred word for it.’

‘Your sacred word,’ said the Verger in disgust. He turned and walked away.

‘This monkey’s gone to heaven, laughing boy,’ whispered Snapper. ‘Time to snog god in the eye.’

‘I daresay.’

I was quite prepared to lie expiring in a bloodpuddle the shape of the British Isles, slick with acceptance. Goodbye to a world of re-run conversation and louts who swear blind that sand is yellow.

A way off, everyone stood blank-faced and shimmering in the rising heat. Adrienne was wearing the slave bracelet I had given her. Life rammed me between the eyes.

The Verger raised a signal cloth. Snap and I stood back to back, and at the drop of the cloth we were off.

It was just like a stroll in the garden, except that I was about to die. Details were blazing up pell mell. There were useless golden bees and other hilarious insects. Cornflower skies over burnt lawns, bleaching bones and the whiskers of flowers. Copper leaves surrounded trees like happy, fairy-tale blood. The fathomless lake floated like a mirage. The shed was a bronzed pagoda brimming with smug, infuriating sages. The sun was dripping like an ingot. I saw the sap sweating from a tree, heard the tickle of every leaf upon every other leaf.

Preoccupied with these sensations, I collided with an ornamental concrete leper. Realising my situation, I wheeled about. Snap was in position with a raised gun. This was it. But my mind was still off the hook. I didn’t feel worried.

He fired wide.

Who was I trying to fool? I felt such a damburst of relief I started singing discordant gibberish and eating grass and soil, sobbing with hilarity as I strutted like an untried matador. I heard distant applause from the onlookers. The gun lay forgotten nearby, full of blanks. Father would explain that firing wide was part of the tradition - as was being scared shitless.

I knelt on the lawn, peacefully chewing grass and earth. Immense fluxes of heat were rippling the air. The Hall was blurring and warping like a pious motive.

The following day was chilly and damp. The Hall continued to warp.

Near the end I became more fractious about the family, and thought Mr Mandible would understand. ‘Most youngsters are provided with memories of fun and alienation, and what do I get - nuns drilling sheetmetal, a dead old woman, a squad of interchangeable uncles and a synthetic Verger. What will I be like when I reach my prime?’

‘A master chef?’

‘What? I’d rather be glimpsed in a wood now and again, running the other way.’

‘A feral enigma, you mean? Really laughing boy I’m surprised at you. This place seems to me a child’s garden of terror and experience, full of sinister flowers and gobbets of pulsating gas.’

‘Precisely.’

Mandible began to describe his own life in polychrome terms. ‘Certain lack of family,’ he said. ‘Died all at once early on. At the theatre.’

‘How many were involved?’

‘Five in all. Large chandelier flattened them, ridden down upon the audience by an unclothed gentleman. I’m told they never knew a thing - though anyone who met them in life could hardly have failed to notice that.’

‘They felt no pain?’

‘Apparently not. In fact from what I hear of the play I suspect all five of them were dead before the incident occurred. So from then on I had to get by on charm alone, a course of action which culminated in my wrestling an enraged chimp on a rattling bobsled. My endeavours to enlist in the armed forces having been thwarted by my inability to be found, I took a series of blithely unsecured loans until my very eyelids were seized for nonpayment. I had always had a fondness for brains and offal - but particularly brains. Look at that,’ he said, gesturing at a murky fishtank and its bubbling cargo. ‘A mere four pounder but able to recall the Brandenburg Concertos before you can say Jack Robinson. And all this I owe to my upbringing. The point is, laughing boy, we all draw something from our environment, like soft flesh from bone.’

I gazed around his room. On the mantel was a 22-calibre pocket gun which he claimed reminded him of ‘younger and happier days’. A variety of hen jaws were hung on a pegboard on the wall - I was momentarily disconcerted to see that some possessed incisors. ‘Do you mean to say this distorted household could serve as a nutrient-rich support matrix for my prowess in every worthy area?’

‘I mean simply that you shouldn’t blame the slobbering miscreants of this place for behaviour they were exhibiting when you were still bloodshot and unborn. Forgiveness, child, not exploitation.’

There was a thought - and not before time. The Hall was a sanctuary from the fatal banality of a world unable to discern between a boy who’s boring and a boy who’s bored. My cup was overflowing - but with what?

‘So didn’t you and your family ever have disagreements, Mr Mandible?’

‘Certainly we did.’ He picked up a black and white portrait of his parents and peers, smiling fondly. ‘My father.’ He chuckled in remembrance. ‘I once picked him up by the ears and told him to stick his scholarly incomprehension up his arse. God I was unpleasant. Couldn’t have been more than three years old. He was angry as hell ofcourse, tied me to a metal cutting lathe. Escaped and snuck up behind him, announcing my liberty with a hydraulic jack.’ Mandible had begun to shudder, flecks of foam hailing from his mouth. ‘And I told him plainly, “Ha, ha, ha - I don’t give a damn!” And I struck him, and struck him - until he knew!’

He grabbed an egg timer off a shelf and said it contained his parents’ ashes, turning it this way and that to watch the flow amid belting laughter. I became bored and left, but was thoughtful amid a germinating insight. That which must be grown out of may rarely be a way of life, and that which is a way of life may rarely be grown out of - both rarities are infinitely precious. Back there was a man with an appreciation of the finer things. I too would have a family portrait - it would be a way of confirming that I was grateful, that their memory was not to be discarded, that I knew there was more to my family than the use I could make of them and that we were sophisticated enough to hang other things on our wall besides haunted cow heads encrusted with cement.

So I got everyone together near the hothouse, grouping them like normal people. Even the Verger threw back his hood. I ducked under the cloth of an old tripod box camera and hit the button. In the developing room, it all grew clear. Pointed skyward were the gormless gape, brittle sockets and marbled cartilage the careful philosopher would have expected. I recognised nobody - only the stance and clothing marked them out. On top of every neck was a cartoonish fish head, sucked of flesh and jelly as though in a single gulp.